Once a year- Lange Nacht der Museen 2018

  The bright lights, throngs of happy people, food, music, tours and
balloons. For one night each year,  the heart of Austria beats for art and culture.




   I love going to museums, I could go everyday. There is so much to see that I have often thought it would be beneficial to see an exhibition at least once a week as long as it was showing. Obviously not every single exhibition, but certainly the ones I like. I know! I am strange.

  Everyone at school- maybe I should go to the museum;
 all my friends at work (the sad reality of working from home is opposite schedules to those who 'go' to work)- museum;
Weekend, I think a trip to the museum is in order.
Sunny day, Walk to the museum;
rainy day- I need to be inside on a day like this- museum;
meet a friend- let's go to the museum.
It will come as no surprise that I have a year pass to the local museums in my city.

      I have noticed that, unfortunately, not everyone shares my passion for curated art, and even my own family sometimes groans when I suggest a museum day. It is possibly this fact that results in my being often relatively alone there. Sometimes there are a few other visitors, others there are none. Most often, I am alone with the art, and the guards.

    There is one night per year, however, where everything is different. On this night of all nights museums, art galeries and art clubs put on their best and throw a party- and everyone comes. The Lange Nacht der Museen 2018 is a nation wide event hosted by the national broadcasting service, ORF.



    Since there is always so much to see and do at each of the venues, making any kind of progress is extremely difficult. Busses are set up to to shuttle the long night visitor on different routes. The amount of time you are given,  7 hours; 18:00 to 1:00 am. This year we decided to just go two places. A printing club with a variety of old printing presses and a small private museum with a collection of keys and locks.

Druckzeug:

   For those of you who have been reading my posts for a while, I briefly mentioned Druckzeug, a local printers guild in my post on linoleum cuts. I have linked it below under Stamp Making. But it deserves another mention here. Founded in 1867 as a printer of books it was sold by it's original owner to one of his employees, a certain Alexander Bauer, due to old age. It remained in his family for three generations and was once again sold in 1998 to a printer who has been influential in preserving it intact and rescuing it financially. As it stands today it is a small workshop full of antiquated but fully funtional printing presses and machines worked by a number of skilled artists and print makers. The work they turn out is available in their shop as well as to clients in the form of advertisements and posters.
   On Saturday evening the presses where whirring and pounding and there was a general sound and smell of machinery in the overfilled workshop. The members of the guild had been busy for sometime beforehand preparing both linoleum cuts and stamps for visitors to use in making their own prints.
  Our family had such a good time printing that we must have spent almost two hours there. In any case it made up about half of our evening, we even ate a dinner of goulasch and bread before leaving. Druckzeug deserves a post of it's own so I will simply show some of the picutres I took during our fun hands on evening.

*All prints pictured are the intellectual property of Anita Lili Haxhija and Jana Graupner und may not be reproduced without their permission.

Rotor

 While we were walking to the schell museum we stopped briefly in the Rotor gallery to view an exhibition describing the journey of a refugee fleeing to Europe. It was really well done and included a lot of different types of instalations.

Schell Collection

     A museum that even I had no interest in going to is the key and lock museum (Schloss und Schlüsselmuseum). When we first arrived in this town I passed it repeatedly in the course of my routine errands. An uninteresting building, looking more like a warehouse, set just a touch too far back from the street with a parking lot in between, it also has the disadvantage of being private and therefore not included in the Joanneum museum group, accessable with the yearly pass. Years passed before I decided to just drop in during a past long night.

I couldn't believe my eyes - such an unpreposessing building, stuffed with incredible and fascinating treasures. It contains keys, locks, and even whole doors from many parts of the world as well as smaller subcollections of specialized keys such as coffin, widower, and sugar box keys. Each subcollection has a story. And the stories are really interesting. For example, I did not know that in previous generations a woman recieved the key to the family sugar box upon her marriage. She was then responsible for doling out the sugar and keeping it safe from servants and children. If she died before her husband, it reverted, along with the other household keys, to him. As a widower he wore a small, decorative key attatched to his watch chain to signal that he had charge of it. His decorative key indicated his status, and depending on its visibility and position whether or not he was on the lookout for someone to pass it on to.

 I never knew there were so many interesting locks available. Since my perusal of this past weekend I feel a strong desire to own an animal lock.


 There is also an entire floor of cast iron work- some of which is extremely delicate, eg. jewelry, and other which is very heavy indead,such as the statuary.

The four seasons

  Needless to say, the second half of our long night was spent here. And it will come as no suprise that while the children were trying to figure out how to open the trick locks, I was sketching keys.


   Do the museums in your areas have a long night or day of open doors? Have you been? What was the most memorable thing you experienced at one? Let me know in the comments.


If you liked this post you might also enjoy:
- Museo della Carta- Toscolano
-Mantova- Home of the Art Obsessed Gonzagas
- Stamp Making

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